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Esar comments on Things philosophers have debated - Less Wrong Discussion
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As to Spinoza, you make a good point, though using Spinoza's (or Plato's) refined sense of what 'knowledge' is as opposed to the everyday claims we would today call 'knowledge' (e.g. I know that the sky over Chicago is clear today) seems to me to go against the spirit of your initial complaint: neither Plato nor Spinoza thinks you can 'know everything about the universe a priori' in our sense of 'know'. If they do believe that, then it is because they have a much stricter understanding of what knowledge is. It's not as if they think they can deduce the existence of my pen from a priori axioms.
Point taken, but I would point out that both Plato and Spinoza think that our everyday claims about knowledge don't map onto reality, so they can't talk about what we 'know' in the everyday sense of 'know.' They don't think that is a valid way to talk about knowledge at all.